PUBLIC LIVES

PUBLIC LIVES; Buildings Chief Now a Morals Enforcer, Too

By DAVID FIRESTONE

Published: August 11, 1998

THE torrent of falling bricks and scaffolding around the city over the last year had already made Gaston Silva the most quoted buildings commissioner in recent city history when the crackdown on sex shops happened a few weeks ago. To its surprise, Mr. Silva's prosaic department, with its fusty permit books and cranky plumbing examiners, suddenly found itself in the moral wetlands of the adult entertainment industry, enforcing the new zoning law by measuring bikini coverage and counting X-rated videotapes.

It wasn't quite what Mr. Silva imagined when he took the job two years ago. Especially because he now has a new headache: the wives of the inspectors, who would prefer to see their husbands checking welds and concrete strength instead of female flesh.

''Some of the wives of the inspectors have been complaining,'' he said last week, shaking his head while trying to suppress a grin. ''They don't like this duty for their husbands. Our guys are, you know, building inspectors, and here they are going with vice cops to these places. They have a very different background. They're used to different things. But somehow'' -- and here the grin can be restrained no longer -- ''somehow, they're handling it.''

(The inspectors have the right to opt out of these assignments on moral and religious grounds. For the record, none have done so.)

It's been that kind of year for Gaston Silva, the unpretentious architect chosen by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to head the Buildings Department in 1996, who has been unable to stay out of the news ever since. He got his first bad-news beep while on vacation with his family a few days before he started work, after a truck knocked down a sidewalk shed on Lexington Avenue.

The subsequent beeps never stopped: Yankee Stadium, the bricks of Madison Avenue, the Selwyn Theater, the Conde Nast building. Just yesterday, a sheet of bricks fell 39 stories from a midtown skyscraper.

Defying the very human desire to find a pattern in random events, Mr. Silva insists that the spate of building failures cannot be traced to a single phenomenon or trend. He doesn't joke about premillennial superstitions or the city's jellied moral foundations. But when pressed, Mr. Silva, who generally has the last word in the administration on how to proceed after major building accidents, is fatalistic enough to acknowledge that every failure is ultimately a manifestation of human error. ''Materials don't fail; people fail,'' he likes to say, quoting from a large tome on design failures atop his desk.

Some of the incidents, like Madison Avenue and the Selwyn Theater, were clearly the result of contractor negligence, and Mr. Silva doesn't hesitate to say so. Others, including the various falling parapets, are more likely due to improper maintenance, while some, including the Conde Nast building, remain mysteries.

He said none of the accidents are related to the Giuliani administration's policy of self-certification, begun by his predecessor and enthusiastically continued by Mr. Silva, under which architects and engineers are allowed to assert that their plans meet city specifications to receive a permit and speed through bottlenecks. The city is supposed to spot-check the projects for compliance, although inspectors say such checks are rare.

Some architects and engineers say that Mr. Silva, calm and rarely given to angry displays, has failed to put the fear of God into the construction community. But though he acknowledges the presence of shoddy, irresponsible contractors, he has an architect's faith in professional competence, and says many people have the wrong idea about the department's abilities.

''The Buildings Department can never guarantee that a building is built properly,'' he said. ''We do guarantee that a process has been followed, an application filed by a licensed architect or engineer, but we don't build the buildings. Even when an inspector goes out, he's only looking at a small fraction of what's out there.''

UNLIKE many of the Mayor's appointments, Mr. Silva is not a longtime Giuliani loyalist, having entered city government when the Koch administration appointed him to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. He hadn't even met Mr. Giuliani when he was moved in 1996 from the Board of Standards and Appeals to Buildings. His true love is design, particularly 17th-century Italian architecture, but his refusal to discuss local buildings reflects a careful diplomacy often noted by his colleagues in the private sector.

''He was a master mediator and problem solver,'' said James Stewart Polshek, a prominent local architect for whom Mr. Silva worked on several major projects, including the renovation of Carnegie Hall. ''There are different kinds of architects, and he was a manager-technician at the most sophisticated level.''

Mr. Silva, 45, one of the few commissioners who drives himself around town, spoke no English when he fled Cuba in 1960 with his parents, who became teachers. After growing up with three families of relatives in one house in River Edge, N.J., he graduated from architecture school at the University of Pennsylvania, and now lives with his wife and two young children in a brownstone in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. And no one is complaining that he is spending much more time on the Conde Nast accident than on certain other establishments in Times Square.

Photo: Gaston Silva, 45, the oft-quoted Buildings Commissioner in New York City. (Librado Romero/The New York Times)